The invention relates to a method and an apparatus for an electronic bridge game.
The commercial success of electronic chess games has encouraged manufacturers to make electronic bridge games, but the undertaking has turned out to be much more difficult than for chess, since the bridge game apparatus must be capable of playing with one, two, three, or four players actually present, and it cannot make do, during play, with determining the best course of action over four or five turns ahead.
Bridge game apparatuses proposed in the past are not satisfactory, for numerous reasons:
in these machines playing cards are replaced by luminous symbols, and this is less attractive;
they do not allow four people present to play together; and
they are incapable of giving an explanation or displaying a comment, even briefly, on an essential stage of the game.
In addition, although prior machines are capable of bidding fairly well in most cases, they turn out to be extremely poor and particularly unsatisfactory in card play.